Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I appreciate the welcome, as a new member of this committee, and really look forward to working with everybody on issues for which we probably all have the same objective.
Since I don't know what you were working on other than what I have read about in the binder, I'm not weighing in on that in my remarks, but I would like to make some remarks about the salmon situation.
My view, as a matter of context for that, is that it remains a huge concern. Salmon, of course, is the iconic species for our first nations and their culture and food provisioning, and the trends have been very negative for a very long time. This year represents the salmon that were hatched and went out to sea four years ago, so it does not necessarily mean the problems have been solved. In fact, there's a possibility that this huge year had to do with the flooding of hatchery-raised salmon that survived, for whatever reasons, but then became a potential risk to wild salmon.
It's very complex, and the science has a huge number of holes in it. Essentially, the scientists tell me that it's a black box. Once the Fraser River salmon get past certain checkpoints in the Georgia Strait, the scientists have no idea where they go for three and a half years, what they do, what the problems are, where the die-offs are, and why they sometimes simply don't return. So we have huge challenges to have a sustainable salmon fishery and to conserve our salmon on the Pacific coast for the long term.
The diversity of salmon is another concern. We may have a huge run of one set of salmon species that originate in one area of the interior, and yet we are seeing that other salmon stocks are species at risk or are on the verge of extinction. And that hasn't changed either.
I know there will be a process for determining the priorities of the committee, but I just wanted to weigh in on the issue of salmon. We are not out of the woods by any means, and the fact that we couldn't predict this abundance and have no idea how it fits into the research and the science that we've seen points to the fact that there's a lot that needs to be done so we can be good conservators and good stewards of our salmon.
Thanks.